Historical Developments in Early Mesopotamia

If we now go back and examine the historical developments of this long era more closely, we can see how the rise of the state was accompanied by this twofold attitude towards violence in which it should disappear at home, except as exercised by divinely chosen monarchs, while at the same time it must be delivered abroad with muscular regularity.

The first six centuries or so of the third millennium bce in Mesopotamia comprise what historians label the Early Dynastic period. This is a reflection of the growth of secular authority in city-states that we identify with the institution of dynastic kingship. This was a time that has also been described as a Mesopotamian ‘warring states' period, in which cities vied with one another for regional hegemony. The development of palaces and city walls as new features of monumental public architecture can be traced to the begin­ning of the third millennium bce and provide a clear indication of the growth of military leadership within communities and the idea that the community needed to be protected from violence.^[450]

Some of the most compelling archaeological evidence from the Early Dynastic period shows directly that this leadership brought with it new forms of violence.

Much more enduring in Mesopotamia was the conception of the king as war leader that we find on one of the more famous objects also found in the royal cemetery, the Standard of Ur. On one side of the standard, as on the Stele of the Vultures, the king leads his troops into battle. The identities of the men being slaughtered and trampled on the standard are not imme­diately clear to us (they were perhaps outsiders or the soldiers of a neighbouring city), but the power of the great man at the centre of this violence is abundantly clear.^[452] The image on the other side of the Standard of Ur shows us the beneficiaries of that violence: the king and his court banqueting amidst servants and musicians. These elites presided over a highly structured community in which violence was used to maintain their prerogatives and wealth.

The long century of conflict between Umma and Lagash that was so well documented in the middle of the third millennium bce illustrates the inability of the individual city-states of southern Mesopotamia to resolve the tensions related to their territorial growth. In this environment violence was a constant companion to state formation, but regular violence between the city-states was counter-productive, and moreover it did not fit neatly into Mesopotamian narratives that suggested that violence should be directed at the world outside of its alluvial plains.

The establishment of the first large territorial state in Mesopotamia also had its origins at Kish, which was the initial base of operations for Sargon, who, as king of Akkad, united southern Mesopotamia into a single royal community.

Sargon, king of Agade, bailiff of Ishtar, king of the universe, anointed priest of An, lord of the land, governor of Enlil, conquered the city of Uruk and destroyed its walls. He was victorious over Uruk in battle... he captured Lugalzagesi, king of Uruk in battle and led him to the gate of Enlil in a neck stock. Sargon, king of Agade, was victorious over Ur in battle, conquered the city and destroyed its wall. He conquered Eninmar, destroyed its walls, and conquered its district and Lagash as far as the sea. He washed his weapons in the sea... To Sargon, lord of the land Enlil gave no rival. Enlil gave to him the upper sea and lower sea.

(Sargon, king of Akkad, twenty-fourth century bce)1⁷

Sargon's rise to power was accomplished through the defeat of the numerous ancient city-states of the region in multiple campaigns. As he sought to normalise the subordination of previously independent cities he addressed the need to create space in southern Mesopotamia for a royal elite bound to the crown and not dependent on finding a socio-economic place within the old city-states. This was especially true for the soldiers who served the dynasty's interests. These efforts included, famously, the construction of a new capital city, Akkad, which was later abandoned after the fall of the dynasty. The power and wealth of the new kingdom was established in violence and perpetuated in regular campaigns like the one mentioned in the Manishtushu inscription cited above.

The pull of the old city-states was strong enough that the kings of Akkad faced rebellion in southern Mesopotamia.

Naram-Sin, the mighty one, king of Agade. When the four quarters together revolted against him, through the love which Ishtar showed him, he was victorious in nine battles in one year, and the kings whom they had raised against him, he captured. In view of the fact that he protected the founda­tions of his city from danger, his city requested from Ishtar in Eanna, Enlil in Nippur, Dagan in Tuttul, Ninhursag in Kesh, Enki in Eridu, Sin in Ur, Shamash in Sippar, and Nergal in Kutha, that he be made the god of their city, and they built within Agade a temple dedicated to him.

(Naram-Sin, king of Akkad, twenty-third century bce )1

Battle and warfare were a commonplace experience for the inhabitants of early Mesopotamian cities. In the inscription above, Naram-Sin's successes were credited to his strong relationship with the gods, and his people called for him to be rewarded with divinity. Divine kingship was another of the state-building innovations introduced by Sargon's dynasty. Like the ritual murders documented at Ur, divine kingship was a short-lived phenomenon

17 Translation after Douglas Frayne, Sargonic and Gutian Periods (2334-2113 BCE), Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia Early Periods 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), pp. 10-11.

18 Ibid., pp. 113-14.

that was not characteristic of Mesopotamian society after the third millen­nium bce, but these experiments show the close connections between violence, divine mandate and the elite.

After three generations of successors, the dynasty established by Sargon fell at the hands of both internal rebellion and external threats, notably from a group of people from the Zagros mountains called the Guti. The fall of the kingdom was documented by later generations of Mesopotamian scribes in texts like the Cursing of Akkad.^[453] One of the enduring images that emerges from this literature of collapse and lament is the picture of the Gutians as violent outsiders who threatened the civilised world.

The kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur (2112-2004 bce), following in the footsteps of Sargon's dynasty, once again united the cities of southern Mesopotamia into a single kingdom in the twenty-first century bce. The period of their rule is one of the best-documented centuries in all of antiquity. Well over 100,000 texts are extant in museums, libraries and private collec­tions around the world, and there are countless more unpublished tablets. Indeed, so dense is the documentary evidence that it is possible to track the activity in some royal workshops for almost every day of a given year. The bulk of these texts were administrative documents created for the crown and its dependants.

A striking aspect of this period, and its written record, is the ubiquity of warfare and state-sponsored violence. The conventions for keeping track of time in southern Mesopotamia included royal year names. Each year was named for a significant event, such as the building of a temple or cult statue, or a military campaign. The most common events recorded in the year names at the end of the third millennium bce were frequent raids beyond the frontier of the kingdom. Nearly half of the years in the twenty-first century bce were named for the defeat of foreign cities and lands. In the enormous corpus of texts that survive from the Ur III period, it is very difficult to find a moment of peaceful relations. The first references to military activity in the year names occur in the twentieth year of Shulgi when the citizens of Ur were organised as spearmen. The pace of military activity really picks up in the aftermath of Shulgi's defeat of Karhar, recorded as his twenty-fourth year name. According to the data gathered by Manuel Molina, Shulgi 25 is the first year from which more than a few dozen Ur III texts are known.^[454] From that year onwards there is a steady stream of surviving documents that peaks in the years of well-documented warfare.

There may have been no years under the kings of Ur in the twenty-first century bce that did not witness warfare. Therefore, the kingdom was engaged in armed conflict for perhaps as much as a century without pause. Ultimately, the constant warfare in which the Ur III state engaged during this era was less a strategic imperative than a social and economic necessity. The ideology of kingship was intimately connected with the exercise of violence, and the king's ability to successfully undertake military campaigns was essential to his public image. The crown relied on a military elite to enact this violence in the periphery. Both the royal family and this military elite became dependent on the wealth that these campaigns brought to their individual households. What I am describing is a form of patron-client relationship made possible through warfare. Increasingly, the kingdom was bound together by its participation in military campaigns and the direct economic benefits of that activity. Our texts even inform us of the banquets that the kings hosted after receiving booty from the campaigns - and these clearly echo the scenes on the Standard of Ur from half a millennium earlier.

The inauguration of constant warfare in the twenty-first century bce was the culmination of a millennium of societal development in southern Mesopotamia connected to the political project of creating territorial states centred on the person of the king, his divine mandate and his martial prowess. Thousands of administrative documents record the results of cam­paigns to the north and east of the alluvial plains of Mesopotamia, and this is even more striking since we have not yet recovered the central state archives at the capital city of Ur, which must have contained the core military records.^[455] Of course, these campaigns were also memorialised in royal inscriptions.

Shu-Suen, mighty king, king of Ur, king of the four quarters, by the might of Enlil, his lord, and at the command Ninlil, his beloved lady, was victorious in those battles and combats. He killed both the strong and the weak. He sowed the heads of the just and the iniquitous alike like seeds. He piled up the corpses of the people into a heap. Their lords he took as bound captives... The men who had evaded battle and who, like birds, saved their lives by fleeing, did not escape his hand. He turned their established cities and villages into heaps. He destroyed their walls. He blinded the men of those cities, whom he had overtaken, and established them as servants in the orchards of the great gods. And the women of those cities, whom he had overtaken, he offered as a present to the weaving mills of the great gods. Their cattle, sheep, goats, and asses he led away...

(Shu-Suen, king of Ur, twenty-first century bce )^[456]

In this example, Shu-Suen, the penultimate king of the dynasty, campaigns in the north-eastern periphery in his eighth regnal year in an attempt to restore the power and prestige of his dynasty after several years of setbacks. His account includes the usual bloody tale of destruction, but it also carefully lists the booty hauled away from distant communities. Indeed, the text goes on to discuss the ongoing exploitation of resources there. In the aftermath of the campaigns and the initial collection of booty, these areas became a steady source of tribute in the form of livestock and foreign goods. These transfers were largely carried out by members of the military elite in Sumer and by allied leaders among the defeated communities.

The military activities of the Ur III kings to the east and north-east of their frontier were undertaken to ensure the continued flow of this tribute, both from dependent states and from military personnel and high-ranking officials of the kingdom. Significantly, these were raids aimed at securing resources and weakening outside groups; they were not aimed at the outright control of foreign territory. Certainly, the local economy was prosperous enough to support the large urban centres of southern Mesopotamia even without active foreign trade, but the prestige economy of the Ur III kingdom, and the patrimonial administration that that economy supported, required the constant injection of the resources that came from the domination of the eastern and north-eastern peripheries of the state. The tremendous adminis­trative apparatus that developed in Mesopotamia under both the dynasties of Sargon and Ur-Namma was devoted in large part to registering the participa­tion of elites in this system of patronage and control. The administrators wrote and preserved long lists of offerings from notables that memorialised their contributions to the royal household.

The kingdom of Ur collapsed at the very end of the third millennium bce, again as the result of internal struggles and outside forces. Indeed, the last king of Ur was carried off to the east by an Elamite king, a victim of the kind of violent campaigns that had become routine in this era. Following the fall of Ur, two centuries of conflict ensued among smaller kingdoms, each larger than an individual city-state but also much smaller than the earlier kingdoms of Akkad and Ur.^[457] By the eighteenth century bce this era of warfare and battle had set the stage for the rise of the kingdom of Babylon and the establishment of its hegemony over the region under Hammurabi. His conquest of Mesopotamia was achieved through a combination of warfare and diplomacy that became characteristic of the ancient Near East for much of the second millennium bce.

Ultimately, what I am suggesting is a broad pattern of state formation and its relationship with violence in which the kings of city-states first pushed violence outside of cities and the walls that grew up to protect them, and then the kings of territorial states pushed violence outside of the cultural bound­aries of Mesopotamian civilisation. These kings then found themselves ruling over larger political communities in which it was necessary to insist that the only legitimate exercise of violence belonged to the kings acting on behalf of divine forces to which they were directly related.

All of these territorial kingdoms of early Mesopotamia were created and supported through violence; that each lasted only a few generations is indicative of their failure to craft more enduring institutions outside of those devoted to violence. They had successfully appropriated the legit­imate exercise of violence for the state, but they had not built an idea of the state beyond the king's extended military household. The ephemeral and experimental nature of these states was bound up in their use of violence.

By the advent of the Late Bronze Age this idea of the territorial state had become fixed in the political economy of Mesopotamia, and its home was the city of Babylon. The long-term successors to Hammurabi's dynasty were the Kassite kings of Babylon, and the extent to which they adhered to these patterns can be seen in the famous Amarna Letters, which record some of the diplomatic correspondence of the Egyptian Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs with their counterparts in the Near East.^[458] The letters preserve the efforts of the pharaohs and their correspondents to safeguard their kingdoms from the powerful states that now surrounded them while also maintaining access to prestige trade goods. The kings of states such as Egypt, Babylon and the Hittites could no longer campaign with impunity against outsiders, but they stood ready to go to war to keep their realms intact.^[459] These kings also acknowledged each other as the arbiters of violence within their own spheres of influence. The Babylonian king Burna-Buriash wrote to Egypt in the fourteenth century bce:

My brother and I made a mutual declaration of friendship, and this is what we said: ‘Just as our fathers were friends with one another, so will we be friends with one another.' Now, my merchants... were detained in Canaan... Canaan is your country, and its kings are your servants. In your country I have been despoiled. Bring them to account and make compensation for the money that they took away. Put to death the men who put my servants to death, and so avenge their blood. And if you do not put these men to death, they are going to kill again, be it a caravan of mine or your own messengers, and so messengers between us will thereby be cut off.^[460]

This letter demonstrates a number of assumptions that could be made in the royal courts of the second millennium bce Near East as a result of the previous two millennia of historical developments. First, the proper exercise of violence was a royal prerogative. Second, this prerogative was exclusively exercised within the boundaries of states, and these boundaries were often culturally determined. Third, the benefits of the control of violence could be measured commercially. And finally, by the end of the Bronze Age this was a shared enterprise among numerous large and powerful kingdoms.